SharePoint University

My client currently has an issue where the alerts are not working.  The initial confirmation gets sent, but no alerts are created when an alert is set up and item is added/deleted, etc...  It appears that this issue is occuring when the server runs out of hard drive space.  I've spent a few days researching a fix, but to no avail. Sharepoint SP1 was installed previously in attempt to fix the alerts.

So far I've:

• Verified Alerts are enabled (set alerts-enabled to false, then back to true.)
• tried stsadm -o updatealerttemplates -url "http://client" -filename "c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\template\xml\alerttemplates.xml"
• tried STSADM -o setproperty -pn job-immediate-alerts -url url -pv "every 3 minutes"
  tried sts add-on stsadm -o restarttimer
• tried using sts add-on stsadm -updatealerts as client has web server https:// and app server http://, so  to do a search and replace of https with http and vice versa (alert propertybag setting).
• added the account used to run the SharePoint Timer Service as SharePoint Administration Group account (farm admin).
• Made sure the account used for OWSTimer.exe had read/write access to the Content Databases and SQL.
• verified account that the SharePoint Timer Service is running under does have access to the content database
• Re-entered username and password of Timer service account, stopped, started
• rebooted the servers (web, app, and db)
• Looked in WSS_Content and other content db's and looked in ImmedSubscriptions, schedsubscriptions for anything out of the ordinary.
• Looked in log files and this message appears.
• break permissions of site, then list/doc lib, then re-inherit.
• Ran vb script to test message to verify the configuration of the SMTP service (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc718983.aspx)

1 thing I've come accross, but would rather wait until the last draw:

• wipe out ImmedSubscriptions and SchedSubscriptions tables and have users re-create alerts

Any suggestions would be MUCH appreciatted

I hope this post will become useful by containing many things to try when alerts are not working.

Regards,

So, you're saying the alerts work,. the server runs out of space, the alerts stop working, you free up space on the server and the alerts work again?

Or are you saying that after you freed up the space the alerts quit working?

If the server is running our of space, there are a lot bigger issues than the alerts not working...  In basic terms though, when the server runs out of space, it has no where to create the alerts (temporarily) in order to process them.  In addition to not creating alerts, running out of server space on a Sharepoint server is a critical issue!

Yes, I am aware that running out of space is a critical issue.  We are taking care of that.  In the past, when more space was freed up, the Alerts would work again.  Not this time.  Still looking into it now and will post more things we've look for.  We created a new web app, new site collection and alerts worked fine on new web app/site collection...will keep this post 'posted' to results...

Jon

We had this same issue.  It turned out to be our cache folder was gone.  For some reason SharePoint doesn't re-create the folder.  None of the timer jobs were running even though the timer services was started.  Once I re-created the GUID folder located here C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\<guid>\ my alerts started working.  For more infomation see  http://tomblog.insomniacminds.com/2008/07/

Hope this helps!

Thanks Bierdjb.  I never heard of that before.  Sorry I didn't post back to this thread.  We fixed the Alerts issue, but we have no clue what 'fixed it'.  We did the following:

 1. We found that one of the front end servers didn't properly upgrade to MOSS 2007 SP1.  We tried to upgrade with the sp1 upgrade file, but it said that it was already upgraded to SP1.

2. We called MS support and they had us modify an XML file to 'force' the upgrade and then our one front end server displayed the proper version.

Duing this 2 day venture, the Alerts started working.  We asked the MS support person if there is anything that during this failed then forced upgrade that could have fixed the alerts.  He wasn't sure, but did say that alerts are controlled by 1 server.  He said it was possible that when we tried to run the upgrade and it failed, it could have kicked the alerts over to the other front end server and therefore started working.  A few knowledgable SP friends said they never heard such a thing.

 So, there you go...I will definetely look into the cache folder being gone.  That was something I didn't know.

 Jonathan Herschel